Category: rant

I don't understand what's wrong with companies today. I, like the rest of you have been following the Google I/O conference announcements for the past couple of days and just heard about Google TV today (yeah I know a bit behind in my feed). I was all excited and was thinking of all the possibilities (think: googletalk, conferencing, streaming ppv, cloud based gaming, etc.). Then, later on, I came across a partner announcement from Logitech....Wow, wait a sec, the mouse company? Yep, it makes sense, they make webcams, keyboards and mice and have in the recent years boughtup Harmony, the guys who make the cool super-nerdy TV remotes. At this point I decide to take a look around the Logitech website and I come across this:Q: What will I need…

Holy crap.....MS has literally photocopied the Apple Store, replaced the Genius Bar with "Answer Bar" and the Genius' with Guru's......Does Microsoft ever come up with something original? :-) Here comes "Attack of the Clones".....hehehehe

Tim Robins' Keynote speech at NAB (National Association of Broadcasters). I missed this event at this years NAB, but I think it's very much worth a listen. Tim really lays it out nicely. Complete in three parts in order.

Yeah, that's why the OLPC team sold their soul to MS....right? Get ready for OLPC running Windows XO. Because there aren't enough lemmings out there. This must be Bill G's wildest dream, an army of illiterate starving kids who'll program the next version of Winblows for food and water.....brilliant.

A lot of people seem to be running into weird network problems with Vista (MS's latest abortion). The symptoms might include:- Windows messenger issues (disconnects, slowness)- Large network file copies get interrupted or are slowwwww- Network file transfers that seem to hang for no reason- Network ghosts turning on/off the network subsystem- Routers having issues that lead to router reboot- Outlook having synchronization issuesA possible solution is turning off auto-tuning. You see Vista being Vista, wants to always be in control, even when it gets on the network with others. MS has built a new feature into it's network stack that allows Vista to auto-tune the size of the send/receive windows.....why would you want to do this by default when half the worlds firewalls discard non-standard packet sizes is a…

According to a slashdot story:Many participants in OLPC's 'Give 1 Get 1' program of last November are now encountering what has come to be known as the 'stuck key' problem, in which one or more of the keys on their XO-1 laptop's built-in keyboard become stuck in an activated position, or are activated when adjacent keys are pressed. More.....Now I'm all for giving and sharing and all that, but what the heck are these guys thinking. First they sell us on the idea that these laptops will help kids in third world learn about computers -- forgetting the fact that 90% of these kids can't read/write. Now it turns out that because they were sourcing the cheapest material in the universe -- from those same third world countries "slave-like" labour…

Remember CDDB, the old database of CD's that people built for people's use. Well that dream got shot and killed when Gracenote, the company behind it, decided to close the platform and sell the data. It looks like private sector strikes again, big time. Sony has just announced that they bought Gracenote and their Database -- remember the one that me, you and millions of others helped build -- for $260m. Nice work S, now I wonder if there is a international law against buying/selling something that does not belong to you. Well ponder on that and start using freedb at freedb.org where things are protected by GPL and will always remain FREE.

I think I will declare today (April 23rd, 2008) as the day of SUCKERS....hehehe. This is fantastic and continues to show how damaging proprietory technologies are to your life. If the Sony ATRAC debacle didn't serve as a warning there's always this: Microsoft just announced that it will no longer supply authorization keys for songs purchased from the defunct MSN Music service. According to the News Desk over at Ars Technica:Customers who have purchased music from Microsoft's now-defunct MSN Music store are now facing a decision they never anticipated making: commit to which computers (and OS) they want to authorize forever, or give up access to the music they paid for. Why? Because Microsoft has decided that it's done supporting the service and will be turning off the MSN Music…

Proprietary technologies suck, no matter how good/neat they sound at the time. Case in point is the Microsoft SPOT (Smart Personal Objects Technology) technology. At a sneak preview of the watches given by Microsoft at COMDEX 2003, Microsoft began referring to the SPOT watches as "Smart Watches with MSN Direct." The purpose of MSN Direct, a new Microsoft service to be offered through a monthly or annual subscription, was to use FM radio subcarriers to feed data to the watches, such as weather, traffic, and other information. Watch owners could choose between two subscription plans: $9.95 a month with the first month at no charge; or $59 for a full year.I still remember sitting in my chair at the 2003 comdex keynote and asking myself why? I mean Bill kept…

So RED is now hyping their little hand held DCinema Camcorder, or as I call it the "Camcorder for people who drive Hummers and have serious penis envy". Yeah baby, my Camcorder shoots 3K...much better than your 1080P peeshooter....haha. Okay lets get real here.....what the hell were those RED guys thinking?......fixed lens, auto mode, no viewfinder and HD-SDI on a camera with identity crisis, in the hands of Joe blow, shooting his next homegrown porn in glorious 3K. Except since he can't edit it in his $2 editing program running on his $5 PC, the poor audience will have to watch the whole thing including all the outtakes........Can you say Reality PORN.